My graduate students and I believe that although naturalistic language is more chaotic and difficult to interpret, it is also much closer to real spoken language. It therefore makes much more sense to study speech in that form rather than through ad hoc experiments or read carrier sentences, since naturalistic speech (as close to natural language as something recorded in a sound booth will ever be!) is closer to actual human spontaneous interactions than reading or eliciting experimental sentences.

This is why we are constructing this page to make a corpus of semi-directed speech freely available... read more